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I’ve not been here much this year. My last post was a year ago, and that was a pretty emotional heartfelt post.

2016 proved not to be much better. You see Dad’s Cancer came back. This time it was his liver.

So everything that I wrote back on 31st December 2015 came back twice as large, twice as emotional, twice as frightening and twice as punchy. Like someone had rewound the tape (showing my age there 😉 ) and played it again only this time it was twice as LOUD!

I was aware that I was carrying that when we faced again, this bloody bastard unreasonable disease that insists on eating people up without thought, concern or awareness for whom it decides to try destroy in its consumption of life. I don’t want to talk too much about Cancer, my friend Fluff writes about it so much better than me and you can read her story of living with and surviving Breast Cancer here in her blog – http://baldybitesback.weebly.com/

All I can talk about is how it effected me. I found myself stretched. Stretched far beyond what I thought my capabilities were, I found myself under the most intolerable stress I have ever encountered. I found myself being my parent’s parent, my father’s counsellor, my mother’s carer, my parent’s referee, the big sister I am. I became of a huge bowl of water, very similar to the bowl that the tai-chi student visualises when they first learn the practice of tai-chi. I was carrying this huge bowl of water in my solar plexus and every knockback, negative encounter with a doctor or nurse, everything that could not be tolerated by others I absorbed and added it drop by drop to my bowl, hoping it wouldn’t spill over the edge.

As my father’s condition worsened, as his body shut down and he withdrew from us I quietly turned myself inside out, to try and become the perfect daughter. I found myself wearing more feminine clothes, (I am a bit of a tomboy forever in my jeans) I brushed his hair, manicured and filed his nails, talked about the Olympics, football, stupid things the cat had done. The odd times he did connect with us I laughed at his jokes, took his rage on the chin and made silent bargains with the air to get him through this.

You see, I know what it’s like, being in hospital, I know the dread, the loneliness, the vulnerability, the waiting. Waiting for the sun to rise, waiting for your loved ones to come through the door, waiting for doctor, waiting for the next test result , waiting to be well again, waiting for all this nightmare to stop. For me that is what hospital is, a ward of people waiting. And I realise now, I had become re-traumatised through my father’s experiences, I was re-living some of my own hospitalisations. What had made me empathic and sensitive to my dad’s needs, were my own needs at the time I was in that hospital bed, bewildered, frightened and lonely.

But again we are so lucky, Dad rallied, after complications, infection and pneumonia we were able to bring him home after a month and half hospital stay. And that’s when I realised that I was re-traumatised. I went back to my training and my work and ran into a brick wall. My body was so tired, my emotions were all over the place, and my anxiety was through the roof. I didn’t know what was my stuff and what was my dad’s stuff. Everything was intertwined and I was suffocating. I needed to separate myself from it. It’s now 4 months of being kind to myself, resting, withdrawing from the social scene when I needed to, being, to put it bluntly, selfish, I am now feeling ready to be curious about the world once more.

So have a peaceful New Year. I am not going to declare any grand hopes and wishes for 2017, the world is in change and with change comes loss and with loss comes grief, and with grief a door that opens….